flat soles for pushing, the middle legs are normal supports, but the
front ones are a study as scientific, mechanically perfect excavators.
There are sharp, horny, downward-projecting pickaxes, lighter
pitchforks, backed by spade-shape implements, and bordered with stiff,
broom-straw edges for sweeping away the loose débris. In fact this
little insect has everything but dynamite for making easy its passage
underground. It even has long feelers behind as well as in front of the
body.
Like the kick-off of a big football game, or Fred Stone, or a shark on
your fish line, when one of my mole crickets came into sight, I knew
that something exciting was certain to follow. On this midnight, while
the big insect had zigzagged toward me, the tide undermined my sandy
elbow-rest, and I slipped. At the first scrape of sand, he put both
oxydactyl hands together over his head and half buried himself with
three flicks. But he was neither coward nor ostrich and after a moment
he had turned and rested his great arms upon the mound of sand, the
strangest parody upon Raphael’s cherubs imaginable. His head turned
from side to side as he watched, and, I almost added, listened, for the
source of danger. I remembered in time that his ears were on his
front arms just below the elbows, sandwiched between the pitchfork and
the shovel. He twisted sharply to the left at the same instant that
a miniature hidden mine was sprung, and a spray of sand shot upward.
Almost before my eye could follow, a second mole cricket appeared, and
each saw in the other the summation of all past troubles and future
hatreds; they hesitated not a second, but flew at each other.
At first there was considerable side-stepping and feinting, and they
whirled about one another until a well-marked ring was worn in the
damp sand. Then they clinched and to my horror a leg flew up and off
into the darkness. Now the timeworn, and at best inadvisable simile
was reversed, and ploughshares as well as shovels, brooms, scissors
and pitchforks were in a twinkling transformed into slap-sticks,
swords, pikes and daggers. Twice the insects reared up on their hind
legs, their arms working like flails. Now and then the lace-like wings
unrolled and shot out as balancers, glistening like metal in the light
of my flash. One cricket fell for a moment, the other pounced and a
whole front arm rolled away. Nothing daunted, and indeed apparently
lightened by the loss of his left arm, my cricket leaped at the other
and bowled him over. I cheered--they both reared again--and were
washed away in a tiny swirl of water,--the tide had turned and the
first of the trios of incoming wavelets had caught all of us unawares.
_Le duel minuit de les courtilières_ was over. Each opponent had lost
a leg, yet they scampered off and dug in with little appearance of
crippling,--one limped a bit and the other sank his well somewhat
obliquely, that was all. I remembered my first experience with these
crickets, when I confined four together in a glass dish, and next
morning found but one, large, plump and happy, surrounded with the
crumbs of eighteen limbs; and I recalled the diminution in numbers of
the broods of infant crickets, and I wondered whether I had better not
slur over part of the home life of my little friends if I wished the
mirror of my affection to remain untarnished.
I turned my light toward the water which was lapping shoreward, and on
the surface were two white spots, mole crickets again, scurrying here
and there with short strokes of the forearms, which had now become
efficient oars. They soon sculled to shore and vanished, and a threat
of moralizing came into my mind; how wonderful it would be if any of us
could so completely master the conditions of life in our environment!
Here were two sandy depressions where the crickets had disappeared;
in a few minutes the tide would cover them, and for eight hours
thereafter the two bundles of vitality would remain buried beneath the
waves, able somehow to breathe and to resurrect, to scamper about on
their business of life on what remained of their legs, to spread their
wings and fly wherever they wished--one place at least being to the
lighted lamp on my laboratory table.
The wash of the tide made me restless and I swept my flash about in a
last survey, when I saw a multitude of little orange-red lamps drifting
toward me. Holding the light obliquely I saw the wraiths of many
shrimps with their periscope eyes illumined by my electric wire. They
swam steadily ahead, half blinded by the glare, until suddenly there
came Nemesis with a rush and a swirl. I caught sight of long waving
tentacles, a gaping mouth, flash after flash of glittering silver, and
there at my feet was a catfish, half stranded with its headlong rush.
Mindful of poisonous spines I flicked him up the beach with a hand
blanket of sand, where he lay protesting with rasping twitters and
peevish grunts until I salvaged him.
My last glance at the beach showed something so strange that I turned
back, and discovered a wholly new field for enthusiasm. Many years
ago I found that tracks in the snow could best be observed and
photographed in slanting rays of the sun, and now my final, casual
sweep threw out into strong relief a series of rabbit tracks; this in
spite of the fact that I was some two thousand miles from the nearest
bunny. Looking down at the tracks they completely vanished, not a
depression or marking could be detected, but oblique lighting showed
the scar of claw marks, all four feet close together, with a good
eighteen inches between leaps. I puzzled long over it, I traced it
almost to the water and up to the soft, dry sand. At last a thought
came to me, and I went up to where I knew there would be, day or night,
a file of leaf-cutting ants. There solemnly watching, and waiting
for some favorable omen to begin her midnight supper, squatted my
pseudo-rabbit, a huge, friendly grandmother of a toad. She blinked, and
I reached down and tickled her side, whereat she grunted and puffed out
prodigiously.
At this moment my eye wandered to a near-by bush and I made a discovery
which whole hours and half days of intensive search and watch had up
to this time failed to reveal. The line of leaf-cutting Atta ants
led up this low shrub and many scores were deployed over the leaves
busy on their eternal work of cutting off circular pieces. For years
I had watched them carry these leaves back, and had seen the free
rides which many small individual ants took back to the nest on these
wavering bits of leaf. Here, in the light of my flash, a medium-sized
ant staggered along beneath a load, as if a man should balance a barn
door on edge on his head. Like small boys hitching on behind a wagon,
there were seven small ants clinging to the top and sides of the bit
of leaf, probably doubling the weight, and altering the whole centre
of gravity. I have seen a Japanese acrobat in the circus balancing a
ladder with several men clinging to it, but this feat was infinitely
more difficult. And there was no display to this. It was all in the
night’s work. These ants know not the meaning of play or vacations or
any moment of unnecessary rest, and yet here were seven of them for
their own convenience making much more difficult the labor of their
larger brother, or rather sister. I knew there was some vital reason,
some _quid pro quo_, but hitherto I had been able only to guess at it.
The small bush made all clear. There were enemy ants in the bush,
who were attempting to drive away the Attas, and their scouts made
attack after attack on the busy harvesters. Unless actually attacked
and bitten, the Atta workers paid no attention to their assailants.
I saw one partly crippled and yet go on with his load as best he
could, playing pacifist for duty’s sake. Their work was definite and
inviolable, to cut a leaf and to transport it to the nest. The huge
Atta soldiers, fat and enormous, who guard the depths of the nest and
occasionally wander aimlessly along the line of march, getting in the
way of their fellows, were nowhere to be seen, but the battalions of
the Minims were in full action. They were too small to cut leaves or
carry them, and had not even strength enough to walk both ways, to and
from the nest. But on the leaves, facing the legions of the giant tree
ants, they showed their worth, their _raison d’être_. I have never seen
such fighters. They equalled the army ants, and lost leg after leg,
even the whole abdomen, without slacking their efforts in the least.
On one leaf I saw a most exciting engagement. Three workers were
cutting along the edge near the tip, and five small Minims were
standing about with jaws raised suspiciously, when three black tree
ants came on at once. One got past on the under side, tackled a worker
and was seized in turn by one of the tiny bulldogs. The black ant let
go the worker and tried to get at his tormentor, who had a good grip on
his tender antenna. Chop went a leg of the Atta, but then another came
to the rescue and got his jaws in a crevice of the armor beneath the
black body. This was too much and the trio fell from the leaf, out of
the range of my light, into the darkness of the sand below. There were
left three Minims and two black ants, the latter four times their size,
and yet so furiously did the little chaps wage battle that the invaders
had no chance to get past to the workers at the leaf edge. Another
black ant now appeared, but close on his heels six Minims, and in the
face of this squad they all fled minus a leg or two, and carrying three
Minims with them who refused to let go, one of which had little of him
left but his jaws which still retained their grip.
I saw only two workers killed or forced to drop their loads in spite
of all the black tree ants could do. All the time new contingents
of Minims were arriving, and in the midst of the hardest fighting,
a little warrior would now and then climb upon a passing leaf and
settle down for a rough trip home. It was as if they belonged to some
autocratic labor union and had to punch a time clock at the nest,
regardless of how things were going in the front line trenches. So the
Mediums are the workers, the providers. The Maxims are the home guard,
and the Minims are the standing army for border warfare, trudging
bravely as far as they are needed to convoy the outgoing workers, but
after battle or their share of watchful waiting getting a free ride
home on any passing chlorophyll lorry.
Immensely pleased with the discovery of another detail of the Attas’
life history I returned to my search for more sand tracks. Walking
along the reeds with light held low, I saw clearly where an opossum
had come out shortly before, dug a little in the sand and passed on,
and most amusing was the record, in an isolated patch of clear, soft
sand, of where a young one had fallen from her back, and straightway
clambered on again. Farther on a big lizard had shuffled along, but the
next track took me thousands of miles northward to New England sands in
autumn,--the fairy footwork of a pair of spotted sandpipers which that
evening, had teetered along the edge of this tropical river.
One last thrill my beach gave when, drawn by some instinct, I scanned
the sand just beyond a clump of sedge. There, fresh and strongly
etched, was a broad, sinuous line up from the water’s edge, flanked
alternately by crescents, deep bitten into the wet surface. This had
been made by no creature with legs, but by some long, heavy body,
alternately pushed up the beach,--the line and crescent sand signet
of a great anaconda--king of all these waters, who, while I watched
shadows a few feet away, had slowly drawn his mighty length past me,
up into the gully beyond,--who shall say where or why!
No wonder this night, so calm and peaceful on the surface had aroused
an ill-defined suspicion of hidden things far otherwise. I looked out
over the water, again alight with reversed constellations, I listened
to the soft lapping of the rising tide, felt the first faint breath of
the new day, and thought of the tragedies I had witnessed--the mole
crickets nursing their wounds in their dugouts deep beneath sand and
water, of the dead grasshopper nymph, the shrimp, the fire in whose
orange eyes was forever quenched, and of the death struggles of the
ants going on in the darkness at my feet.
The opossum was searching for food for itself and its young, and
somewhere the great snake was coiled, watching with lidless, untiring
eyes for its share in some life of lesser strength. It seemed somehow
so cruel, this eternal alternation of life and death. If only the lower
animals,--and then I remembered that perhaps at this very moment my
Indian hunter was pulling trigger on an unsuspecting agouti or curassow
or peccary for my next dinner; it came to me that the very emotions of
compassion and sympathy which moved me, were materialized and sustained
by the strength derived from the sacrifice of many, many lives of
these same lower animals. I stopped thinking, stepped carefully over
the line of insanely industrious Attas, and went to my hammock.
IV
FALLING LEAVES
Next to the dynamic crashing syncopation of a regimental band, or the
subtle, infinitely more emotionally hypnotic beat of a tomtom, comes
the thrilling rhythm hour after hour, of a double row of paddles
tearing and eddying through water in unison, not only the thump and
splash from the dugouts of tropical savages but the deep-dipped rush
and swirl from bark canoes. This is the obvious, the much-described,
but how many of us have listened for, and heard, the low, sibilant
swish of the blades through the air, as they reach forward for the
next stroke. Until mind and ear are focussed it is inaudible, but
when once caught it out-sings more blatant sounds of water and voice.
The blind spots of our perceptions conceal many phases of delicate
beauty in the things around us, aspects which are dulled by the
opacity of familiarity, passed over by the unseeing activity of our
surface-skimming minds.
The living leaf--both singly and in foliage mass--has been epitaphed,
eulogized, sung, praised and similed for centuries, but except for
occasional references to the “sere and yellow leaf,” dying, falling and
dead leaves have been left where they lie, with only the incense of
their funeral pyres woven into the haze of Indian Summer.
I have seen an orang-utan build him a sleeping platform of leaves
in less than three minutes, so it is not improbable that the first
artificial home our more direct ancestors knew was a leafy nest. Leaves
at least formed the sole clothing of our early parents, according to
Scripture, and from nursery days we have always known that falling
leaves were a shroud for the babes in the wood. More than this,
botanists tell us that the leaf is the foundation of flower and fruit,
so that it was really only a mass of highly specialized leaves which
introduced Newton to gravitation.
But the importance and interest of falling leaves in this world
needs no brief from me. I merely want to know them better for my own
pleasure, I wish to hear and see and feel them, and so I leave my
laboratory after a day of intensive technical work and slip into the
jungle, where millions of leaves are falling during my lifetime, and
hundreds of millions fell before I was born.
I am sitting at the edge of a tropical swamp and for the moment trying
to close my mind and sense to the sounds and sights of birds and
insects, and focus on leaves, and especially dead ones. This is no more
difficult than it would have been to have forgotten Caruso and the
orchestra in order to meditate on the kind of wood of which the chairs
were fashioned.
Further than this I am putting out of my mind the letters L E A V E S
and thinking of them innominately as a vast multitude of spread-out
sheets of green and brown tissue. They are really the jungle, for
without them it would be like the bare masts and rigging of a vessel.
High overhead beyond the clouds of chlorophyll are other white clouds
of moisture, driven swiftly westward by the steady trade-wind. Around
me the air is as quiet as in a room, and, as so often the case, of just
the right temperature to be forgotten, neither too hot nor too cold, a
distinct effort being necessary to realize that I am not in some great
enclosed chamber; so calm and equable are the surroundings.
It is the dry season, and the short daily shower does little to
soften the crackle of the fallen leaves. Even after a month of heavy
unseasonable rain when our records show that it is the dry season,
the noise of treading on the jungle floor reveals the actual lack of
humidity at times other than actual precipitation. Now and then, near
my feet, a leaf draws its edges together, turns a little and rustles
gently all by itself as if even in death it dreamed of some pleasant
trifle, something which would please a green leaf, in sunlight, swaying
high in air. Then, like a crumpled bit of paper in a wastebasket, it
settles lower among its fallen fellows. Here it will wait patiently for
the impact of the heavy rains, three or four months hence, to soften
its stiff, crinkling tissues, and re-mold it into incarnations of other
leaves to come.
Fallen leaves have a wind song all their own which is to be heard only
when listened for consciously. When a fitful breeze is blowing, if
the ear is held close to the ground, a low intermittent clatter and
shuffling is audible, with occasionally a real rustle as a delicately
balanced leaf is blown over. Stand up and the carpet of dead leaves
becomes silent, their gentle talk lost in the hubbub of living, moving
foliage.
In this quiet, cool swamp I am impressed with the vast number of leaves
which have started to fall but have not reached the earth. Some have
landed in crotches, or become entangled in masses of vines, others have
driven their stems clear through the live tissue of leaves in their
downward path and hang dangling. Just above me a living and a dead
palmated frond have their leafy fingers intertwined like the outer
points of fighting buckles, with no chance of release until the death
and fall of the second leaf.
As I watched, three leaves fell, each with characteristic motion. I
once made a key to more than a dozen kinds of jungle trees, based on
the way the leaves fell, and to anyone who wishes to enter an untrodden
botanical field I commend this idea. The third leaf fluttered and
eddied, fighting with all its expanse of plane against the pull of
gravitation, and at the very last, came to rest on a mattress of fern
frond--a respite merely, for the first real gust would send it to the
ground. As it touched the fern a butterfly rose, a black heliconian,
with a large red spot on each wing. Its flight was astonishingly like
that of the descending leaf, a tremulous fluttering just carrying it
along, now rising, now descending--a flight wholly deceiving, for
these butterflies can thread the mazes of jungle vines all day without
tiring. But this butterfly was also like the leaf in its sear and faded
garb. The wings were frayed and torn--the black was a thread-bare
brown, the red weathered to faded salmon, and the seams of its wings
showed plainly. Life was nearly over, yet weak as it was, it would
probably die no violent death. The most awkward bird or predatory
insect could catch it at will, yet it flew slowly along, unmolested
by jacamars and cuckoos, dragon and robber flies. Its conspicuous
colors and slow, tantalizing flight, like all else in the jungle, had
a reason--it was its own advertisement of inedibility. Soon, however,
this Wandering Jew of a butterfly would slip from its sleeping porch,
and, like the fluttering leaf, make a last ineffectual struggle against
the pull of earth and its wings would lie among the leaves.
Before the butterfly passed from view, I was startled by a sudden,
rough rip of sound,--and just overhead a macaw put all the harshness of
its beak and the blatancy of its coloring into its voice, and almost
the leaves around me seemed to rustle. Into a clear space of sky four
great, flame-winged birds passed, and with flight direct as arrows,
but otherwise exactly like the falling leaf and the butterfly, they
vibrated northward.
Without intention, but very happily, I found I had chosen my seat
between extremes in leaves. Close along one side lay a fallen leaf
which began eight feet behind and extended twenty-three feet in
front,--thirty-one feet of palm frond. In its fall it had crushed
several young mora saplings and many lesser growths. The least movement
near it aroused a crashing which could be heard to the river. The
leaflets, two hundred in number, lay stretched out four to six feet on
each side, and the mighty stem was like a length of channel iron, with
edges sharp as razors. It was parched and shrunken and had probably
hung dead for a long time before it fell. A billion ordinary leaves
fall unnoticed in the tropics, while in the north we lump this vast
assemblage of happenings under the one word “autumn.” But the fall of
a palm leaf is an event. Once as I was leaving my Station for a trip
north, I noticed that one of the leaves of our sentinel cuyuru palm
was drooping and browned. Months later when I returned, it was still
hanging, and two weeks afterwards fell in the night with a crash which
wakened us all. Dynasties of history might be dated by the falling of
such a leaf, and if I could have been present at the dropping of all
the leaves of my palm, whose scars were still so plain, there would be
material for an epic. The remark of Charles the Second on his deathbed
could be applied to the dead leaf at my side, for these gigantic
fronds grow and live their lives much more rapidly than they die and
disintegrate. Years from now I could probably find traces of the
reinforced cellulose-hardened main stem.
And now my faded and forlorn heliconian butterfly fluttered again
toward me, and almost alighted on this paper, but turning at the
last moment, it rose a bit, and came to rest at my elbow, on a stem
lined with small leaflets. Hardly had the insect furled its wings,
when it fluttered and took to flight again. The cause delighted me
beyond measure,--it had been unseated and frightened by the movement
of a living leaf! At the impact of its delicate feet, the leaflets
of the sensitive plant closed abruptly together and the stem sank.
So exquisite was the reaction that the several leaflets beyond the
insect were unmoved. A few seconds later while I was still watching,
an adjoining twiglet closed every one of its leaflets and dropped
120° upon its parent branch. Nothing had touched it, no breath of air
had moved it. I was puzzled. Lifting it very gently, it broke off and
fell to the ground, green, fresh,--as far as I could see quite without
cause. I picked it up and examined the base and there I found the
source of the trouble. A tiny beetle had cut it almost off, and the
slight fall of the twig, together with my touch had parted the few
remaining fibres. The beetle was very small and must have been laboring
for a long time, and it was a mystery why the featherdom tread of a
butterfly’s feet had accomplished what the hacking and sawing of the
beetle’s jaws had not.
All the leaves on the mimosa would not have equalled one of the lesser
leaflets of the palm frond, and on the ground they were almost
invisible, sinking almost at once into the mold. The sensitive leaves
had the semblance of animal nerves and movement; the palm leaf would
have brained me if it had fallen while I passed beneath.
In these jungles a falling leaf has a whole scale of sounds, as it runs
the descending gamut of collisions. From the top of a tall tree a leaf
may take fifteen or twenty seconds to reach the earth, disregarding the
very good chance of lodgment, and each touch of vine, leaves,--living
and dead,--the caroming off of branches and ripping through thorns,
gives forth a different sound, of which our poor ears can distinguish
very few, and which our language, spoken and written, is wholly
helpless in reproducing. I would like very much to find a word or
sound which would bring to mind the fall of a leaf upon leaves. I know
it perfectly--the generic timbre--the composite echo etched into my
mind by a thousand conscious listenings. But it will not get past my
consciousness to my lips, and utterly refuses to siphon down my arm and
pen.